4
Something utterly
bland droned from the speaker on the windowsill just inside the screen. Jake’s
an amateur harpsichord builder. He looked back down the stairs at me and made
the international sign of the gag reflex. Not our choice of music, I told
myself. I’ll enjoy it because it gives Luke pleasure, and I love Luke.
The screen
door’s peeling white frame greeted us with a rusty creak. Thank God there were
still places like this off the beaten track, I thought, untouched by the synthetic cuteness of every beautiful spot the urban professionals discover as a getaway
and then overrun with Audis and designer boutiques.
Inside,
Luke was standing on his head naked against the wall, a kaftan of deep blue
homespun Indian cotton rolled up beside him, a small uncut amethyst mounted in
silver wire on a chain carefully piled on top. His arms looked too slight to
offer the support the pose needed. But then he’d amazed me time and again with
the asanas he could effortlessly assume. You’d never know to see him practice
that he’d taken up yoga to keep himself mobile in the face of joint problems
that made even Billy’s look like small change. The grace with which he walked in
his skin gave his slight frame a phenomenal sexiness. His build dramatically
accentuated an asset he was sensitive enough about that the rest of us were
careful to lust over it in silence, knowing how anxious he could be that men
might only be interested in what he had hanging between his legs. His cock dangled
as far as his navel toward his wispy goatee and the page-boy
haircut that fell, a little ridiculous in its inversion, from the crown of his
head. His face showed no trace that he’d registered our arrival, his eyes still
closed, his exhalations even through parted lips. He’d come back to us when he
was ready.
Hank strode
in from the kitchen, telegraphed a quick glance at Luke, then whispered to us
in his thickest and most accomplished Phyllis Diller, “Welcome to the cave,
girls. Batboy will rejoin us momentarily. If he doesn’t topple over from the
weight of that tubesteak and break something.”
Kurt
snorted, clamped a hand over Hank’s mouth and blew a raspberry into his neck.
Hank was wearing a pea-green miniskirt, orange pumps and matching disc
earrings. “Fashion error,” Kurt said.
“That skirt cries out for Pepto-Bismol pink.”
“Everyone’s
a critic,” Hank vamped, “but no one’s willing to design.”
You wouldn't peg him for the biggest top of us all, the larger-than-life
Italian New Yorker who'd coaxed countless legs on the Upper West Side into
the air--when he wasn’t dancing to Nine Inch Nails
in the kitchen where he earned his living catering the parties of all the
men he’d slept with. Which was to say a good chunk of queer Manhattan above Columbus
Circle. What he’d done to Jake’s butt the last time we’d set up the massage
table didn’t exactly defy description. But it had stretched more than our
imaginations and left Jake babbling happy obscenities as he arched up to clutch
Rajiv’s shoulders at the head of the table.
“Danny
Deever and his Brahmin prince will be down from the loft any day now, as soon
as they finish checking each other for ticks. For the eighth time. You can never be
too careful in these parts,” Hank camped on.
The room
smelled of cedar that had seasoned through fifty humid summers and fifty snowy
winters in the Smokies. The awning windows, hinged at the tops of their long,
narrow frames, all angled out as Jake had propped them when we first arrived. A
breeze blew through on its way from the Mississippi toward North Carolina. In
the middle of the living room a
hand-braided rug spiralled in a starburst of now-faded colours salvaged
from wool clothes someone’s grandparents had worn. Behind the living-room walls
ran the passage that gave onto the kitchen and three bedrooms. In the corner a
narrow staircase, bookshelves built into its underside, mounted to a railed
gallery that overlooked the communal space. A single long, low upper room
opened directly onto it, brightened by light that streamed through the windows,
filtered by trees that lined the cobbled walk down from the drive above the
house. A tangle of sheets twisted and rose above a bed in the back corner, from
which Jim and Rajiv extricated themselves like two monarch butterflies sharing
a single chrysalis. When they came forward to the gallery, their erections poked out at us from under the rail. Jim’s
blond hair fell lank to his shoulders. He hadn’t cut it since he’d left me. I
found myself wondering what it would feel like brushing the inside of Rajiv’s thighs.
I looked
away, wanting to focus on anything but the sight of the two of them together. Luke
came out of his headstand, curling down into a crouch with his back to us, then
rising to unfold his kaftan and drop it over his head. Draped in its heavily
textured folds, he turned around, came forward, took my hand in one of his and
laid his other over my heart. His eyes lit up in surprise as he touched me.
“You’re refrigerated,” he said.
“And ready
to go back in if you’re coming too,” I said.
“After
lunch, you’ve got a date,” he said. He looked around the room and took in a
deep breath. “It’s so easy to see why Pete chose this place. It’s got his
energy in every corner.”
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